Rana Rais Khan invites to reevaluate our attitudes towards the outward appearance and encourages us to search for the beauty within
Have you ever wondered why Allah has created faces so different? Why do people have to be good or ugly looking by worldly standards? The answer is simple. For Allah, each one of us is beautiful. He says: “Allah, it is He who has made for you the earth as a dwelling place and the sky as a canopy, and has given you shade and made your shapes good (looking)…” (Ghafir 40:64). However, He does have special favourites – those with a beautiful heart, for they are the ones who have equally beautiful deeds.
Humans, on the other hand, are far less forgiving. They have a tendency to seek the exterior beauty. To them, a person means a great mane of hair, a slender figure, big beautiful eyes, or a fair-coloured skin.
Show business is generally considered to be the root of this bizarre concept of beauty, which recognizes only swans in the pond. How come most of their stories revolve around extremely good-looking men and women only? Similarly, novelists are far ahead in the race of depicting an ideal, which is handsome or pretty at any cost.
Marketing gimmicks of today deserve the final applause – they lead people into a blind belief about inadequacy, unless they buy a specific product. They keep on stressing, how wrong we look and how ugly the world would be, if we would follow our own advices only.
Observe your conversations with your friends for a while. You will be spooked to discover, how very often they center on someone’s face or appearance. At school – may be a teacher, on TV – definitely some movie star, at a party – anyone in sight. We spend much time calling names, making fun of others, picking on people, or simply driving them away because of the way they dress or look.
The pressure to look our best and win people over is most obvious in the way we nowadays contract marriages. Dolling up girls and letting them loose in the middle of a party, so that every young man can stare at them to his heart’s content.
Ask yourself – is this the most dignified way of getting married? Besides, can a marriage based on something as superficial as good looks be really successful? This reminds me of a joke I once read. An idealist is the one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than cabbage, concludes that it will also make a better soup!
Trust me, if Allah has ordained marriage for you, your spouse-to-be will manage to find you even in a cave of Africa! If you are not destined to marry by Allah’s wisdom, no makeover can ever match you up.
Do not get me wrong! In every human being, Allah has placed a sense of appreciation, which instinctively appeals to beauty. However, getting carried away into extremes is absurd! Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
Love people for the goodness in their hearts. Only Allah deserves the credit for a beautiful face that He has made. Besides, lasting and cherished relationships are based on deeper matters than one’s appearance, which would pass away in just ten or fifteen years from now, when we would start to wrinkle and gray.
Learn to look beyond a face. Search in a person for intelligence, compassion, humbleness, and truthfulness. You will be surprised to discover that this world is filled with wonderful people!
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